This woman's 12 stone weight loss had a miraculous effect on her face

Now that's a transformation.

By
Elizabeth Narins

Mar 10, 2017

At 5 feet 9 inches, Kaylee Bonnet, now 24, once weighed 481 pounds (just over 34 stone). "Kids and adults [would] say awful things to me in public and give me dirty looks like I was a circus animal," she says — one reason why she stopped leaving her house alone. "I was constantly on the defence."

Kaylee was overweight for as long as she can remember: In high school, she weighed 300 pounds. She was made fun of and had fewer friends than her peers.

"Day to day, life was a constant struggle," she says. "From worrying about if I'll fit in this chair or if the chair will hold me, to trying to look nice and hoping that getting from point A to B doesn't make me sweat my hair and makeup off, I was constantly on the defence."

By the time she reached her mid-20s, Kaylee was pre-diabetic with high blood pressure. Her doctors had already warned her that she'd suffer a heart attack or stroke if she didn't do something about her weight. "I didn't want to die," she says, but she knew she needed to make some changes to prevent that: "You don't get to go through life being 481 pounds," Kaylee explained.

So she decided to get gastric bypass surgery. Before the procedure, though, her surgeon gave her some homework: She'd have to lose 30 to 40 pounds. Determined to succeed, Kaylee drastically cut back on calories, followed a high-protein, low-carb diet, and began walking every damn day. By the time she walked into surgery in October of 2016, she'd lost nearly 77 pounds in less than five months.

After the two weeks of pain that followed her procedure — "It felt like tugging on my stomach, and it was hard to walk," she says — Kaylee made some more major changes to her lifestyle: She cut out high-fat foods and eats only natural sugars, capping her daily intake at 800 calories, since she can literally stomach only small amounts of food. She also goes to Crossfit at least three times a week.

Already down 169 pounds down from her highest weight, she's loving her new figure, even though, at 312 pounds, she knows she still has a ways to go to reach her goal weight of 225 pounds.

In the photo on the right, Kaylee's face is noticeably slimmer than it appears on the left. Her jawline is also more defined on the right, and you can't deny she's got an extra twinkle in her eye. Here's a more current shot with makeup:

"The reactions of others is what surprises me, and it helps me see the change," she says of the transformation.

And if you think she looks happier in the photo on the right, you're right on the money — and isn't that what matters most? "The weight loss has truly changed my life," she says. "I'm actually living life, which I wasn't [doing] before."